As I have been working my through the storyboards for Assignment 2, I found myself from time-to-time confronted with the problem of wanting to put more into the video than the 12 shots the assignment allows me. I began thinking more about the editing process and the role it plays in film-making and how a better understanding of editing might help me with my assignment.

Earlier on in the course I had read Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye, and while I did find the book a fascinating read, it was possibly too early on in the course as I did not appreciate some of the finer points of the book. Going back to the book now, I am able to extract some of the more significant points and apply them to what I am doing. These points are covered below.

Often, an audience is asked to review a film prior to it being released to get their reactions and feedback so that the final edits can be made. Murch advises that if you chose to go this route, then it should be appreciated that what you are getting from the audience is their immediate reaction, which may be very different to the feedback you would get if you asked them questions a few days later when they’ve had time to process what they had seen.

Furthermore, an audience will tell you which scenes they did not like – but this does not necessarily mean that you should immediately change that scene. Murch made an analogy with a pain in the elbow; in some instances the pain in the elbow is caused by a pinched nerve in the shoulder and that’s what needs to be treated, not the elbow. It can be the same with film; the scene the audience does not like may not be the problem. Sometimes you have to look at the set up/lead up to that scene to work out if something is missing that weakens the scene in question – if that can be addressed it may not be necessary to change the original scene.

A rather nice bit of extra information that I gleaned while covering this point, which made me realize that I am building up my film knowledge in a number of areas, is that Walter Murch worked with Fred Zinnemann on the film Julia. I previously did a blog entry on Paul Strand and the making of the movie Redes. Strand and Fred Zinnemann worked on this movie together and it was considered one of the movies that launched Zinnemann’s career in Hollywood.

Murch’s also makes an analogy of the blink of the eye with the point at which a cut should be made in a movie – hence the title. He had been trying to work out why cuts in a movie are so readily accepted by an audience as they do not resemble anything that happens in real life. At first he compares it to dreaming but soon abandons that idea as there isn’t any supporting ‘evidence. Murch (2001:61) began observing when people blink and realized that ‘People will sometimes keep their eyes open for minutes at a time – at other times they blink repeatedly – with many variations in between.’ He wondered what was causing them to blink.

Murch believed that the rate at which a person blinked may be related to their emotional state. He provided the example of a person who was so angry that he didn’t blink at all because he was so fixed on the single thought that holds his anger, as opposed to another person who may also be angry but because the person had many different and conflicting thoughts going on in their head blinked frequently as a way to try to separate the conflicting thoughts (Murch 2001:61).

Murch went further to explain that rate of blinking was important, and also the point at which the blink took place. He believed that the point at which this happened is the ‘mental’ equivalent of a cut in a movie. Murch (2001: 63) claimed that ‘a shot presents us with an idea, or a sequence of ideas, and the cut is the “blink “that separates and punctuates those ideas.’

I watched a brilliant documentary on YouTube called The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing, which covers the history of editing from its beginnings to modern day. A number of very well known Directors and Editors are interviewed, including Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Jodie Foster, Martin Scorsese, Mark Goldblatt, Sally Menke and an amazing Dede Allen (the editor of Bonnie and Clyde).

In this documentary, Walter Murch speaks about his editing approach. On of the aspects that I found fascinating is that when he edits, he stands.

As he edits he talks about what he is thinking about – aside from the emotional moments and cuts in the film, he is also paying attention to detail; spotting potential mismatches in moment between cuts, looking for interesting movement in a group to decide where to start a scene setting shot. As he put it, to edit, you need to enjoy paying attention to the minute details of what happens from one frame to the next, but also an appreciation of how this fits the bigger picture of the scene, and how the scene fits into the sequence and so on.

Murch also speaks of developing a sense of where the audiences’ attention is when they watch a movie and then having the skill to almost care and carrying their attention through the movie ‘without doing violence to it’.

There were a number of messages that came out of The Cutting Edge. Some editors spoke at length about the need to edit according to the emotion that is being portrayed, some about not being afraid to try something different,  but the most overarching message about editing is that it is an instinctually skill that is best learnt by practicing

Bibliography:

Murch, W. (2001) In the Blink of an Eye. A perspective on film editing Ed. 2. Los Angeles:Silman-James Press

The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Film Editing [documentary, online] Dir. Wendy Apple. A.C.E., British Broadcasting Corporation, London. 2004. 54 min.